Dissecting how facile accusations of “anti-Semitism” are used to stifle dissent.

Since the inception of the “War on Terror,” Israel has become increasingly important to Western imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies towards the Palestinians. A key ideological weapon in this development is the cynical and unjustified accusation of “anti-Semitism” to silence protest and dissent.

For historical reasons, this tactic has been deployed most forcefully in France, and in the first of the two essays in this book French writers Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan demolish the “anti-Semitism is everywhere” claim used to bludgeon critics of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the banlieue youth.

In “The Philo-Semitic Reaction,” Ivan Segré undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant reactionary trend that identifies Jewish interests with the “democratic” West. Segré’s aim is to uphold a universalist position and to defend Jewish tradition from Zionist ideological distortion.

Reviews

“The calm and smiling power [of Segré’s work] lies in the logical rigor with which he reads texts.”

– Daniel Bensaïd

“French anti-Semitism is a very different animal to the diffuse form that has existed in the UK and these essays … help us comprehend its complexities. Walking round Tel Aviv nowadays you are more likely to hear French spoken than English. Reading these essays it is not difficult to understand why.”

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand responds to Emmanuel Macron's speech in front of Benjamin Netanyahu, in commemoration of the 1942 Vel d’Hiv round-up of Jews. "Has this former student of philosophy, Paul Ricoeur’s assistant, read so few history books that he does not know that many Jews or descendants of Jewish heritage have always opposed Zionism, without this making them anti-Semites?"

In any case, what sticks out amidst this mass vote is a feeling of absurdity. The absurdity of a mechanism that brings to power a man we know nothing about, and who has grounded his success precisely in his capacity to say nothing (the back cover of his book Révolution has not one line of text, but just a full page photo of Macron himself). The absurdity of a system that gives a crushing majority to such a man, in order to avoid a danger that is largely imaginary. Most of all, the absurdity of a focus on elections that we all feel have nothing to do with our lives, and which we all feel are playing out on a sort of flying carpet, above our heads.